There is Enough Content: The Problems With iTunes and American Idol

Evan Rowe is a local songwriter and performer best known as Catalonia, a professor of political science and history at Broward College, and a small-d democratic strategist with no party affiliation. Each week, we surrender our space for his thoughts on the music industry and how they relate to our region. This week, why musical content (along with much of the digital realm) is unable to fit into market mechanisms.

In part three of the series, we discussed public financing for the radio system, in part four we need to delve into music and the marketplace. Whatever anyone's views on the efficacy of markets, the most fundamental economic explanation for how market logic works is supply and demand. Supply and demand models are in essence an institutional process that establishes pricing by calculating a set of variables too great for any planner to know. Thus, the big knock on central planning (i.e. Soviet economics) was that no matter how smart the pencil pushing bureaucrat in Moscow was, he could not know exactly what the price of bread in Kiev should be. And the price of bread under command economics is set by central planners.

There are simply too many variables for the central planning committees to know in order to set an accurate price on a commodity. Thus, in a free market (how free our western capitalist markets actually are is another matter entirely), the foundation of pricing is built around the idea that if I'm an orange producer and I sell you an orange, I lose the orange and you gain it.